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    The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
    The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
    The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
    Ebook101 pages3 hours

    The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

    By Donna J. Haraway

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    The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in "significant otherness." In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway's answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just "cyborgs for earthly survival" but also, in a more doggish idiom, "shut up and train."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrickly Paradigm Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2023
    ISBN9781958846025
    The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

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      Book preview

      The Companion Species Manifesto - Donna J. Haraway

      Emergent Naturecultures

      From Notes of a Sports Writer’s Daughter:

      Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells—a sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis. I bet if you checked our DNA, you’d find some potent transfections between us. Her saliva must have the viral vectors. Surely, her darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible. Even though we share placement in the phylum of vertebrates, we inhabit not just different genera and divergent families, but altogether different orders.

      How would we sort things out? Canid, hominid; pet, professor; bitch, woman; animal, human; athlete, handler. One of us has a microchip injected under her neck skin for identification; the other has a photo ID California driver’s license. One of us has a written record of her ancestors for twenty generations; one of us does not know her great grandparents’ names. One of us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is called purebred. One of us, equally product of a vast mixture, is called white. Each of these names designates a racial discourse, and we both inherit their consequences in our flesh.

      One of us is at the cusp of flaming, youthful, physical achievement; the other is lusty but over the hill. And we play a team sport called agility on the same expropriated Native land where Cayenne’s ancestors herded merino sheep. These sheep were imported from the already colonial pastoral economy of Australia to feed the California Gold Rush 49ers. In layers of history, layers of biology, layers of naturecultures, complexity is the name of our game. We are both the freedom-hungry offspring of conquest, products of white settler colonies, leaping over hurdles and crawling through tunnels on the playing field.

      I’m sure our genomes are more alike than they should be. There must be some molecular record of our touch in the codes of living that will leave traces in the world, no matter that we are each reproductively silenced females, one by age, one by surgery. Her red merle Australian Shepherd’s quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of my tonsils, with all their eager immune system receptors. Who knows where my chemical receptors carried her messages, or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and binding outside to inside?

      We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story upon story with nothing but the facts. We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is an historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy.

      This manifesto explores two questions flowing from this aberration and legacy: 1) how might an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness be learned from taking dog-human relationships seriously; and 2) how might stories about dog-human worlds finally convince brain-damaged US Americans, and maybe other less historically challenged people, that history matters in naturecultures?

      The Companion Species Manifesto is a personal document, a scholarly foray into too many half known territories, a political act of hope in a world on the edge of global war, and a work permanently in progress, in principle. I offer dog-eaten props and half-trained arguments to reshape some stories I care about a great deal, as a scholar and as a person in my time and place. The story here is mainly about dogs. Passionately engaged in these accounts, I hope to bring my readers into the kennel for life. But I hope also that even the dog phobic—or just those with their minds on higher things—will find arguments and stories that matter to the worlds we might yet live in. The practices and actors in dog worlds, human and non-human alike, ought to be central concerns of technoscience studies. Even closer to my heart, I want my readers to know why I consider dog writing to be a branch of feminist theory, or the other way around.

      This is not my first manifesto; in 1985, I published The Cyborg Manifesto to try to make feminist sense of the implosions of contemporary life in technoscience. Cyborgs are cybernetic organisms, named in 1960 in the context of the space race, the cold war, and imperialist fantasies of technohumanism built into policy and research projects. I tried to inhabit cyborgs critically; i.e., neither in celebration nor condemnation, but in a spirit of ironic appropriation for ends never envisioned by the space warriors. Telling a story of co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality, the present manifesto asks which of two cobbled together figures—cyborgs and companion species—might more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds. These figures are hardly polar opposites. Cyborgs and companion species each bring together the human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture in unexpected ways. Besides, neither a cyborg nor a companion animal pleases the pure of heart who long for better protected species boundaries and sterilization of category deviants. Nonetheless, the differences between even the most politically correct cyborg and an ordinary dog matter.

      I appropriated cyborgs to do feminist work in Reagan’s Star Wars times of the mid-1980s. By the end of the millennium, cyborgs could no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed for critical inquiry. So I go happily to the dogs to explore the birth of the kennel to help craft tools for science studies and feminist theory in the present time, when secondary Bushes threaten to replace the old growth of more livable naturecultures in the carbon budget politics of all water-based life on earth. Having worn the scarlet letters, Cyborgs for earthly survival! long enough, I now brand myself with a slogan only Schutzhund women from dog sports could have come up with, when even a first nip can result in a death sentence: "Run fast; bite

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